CHILDRESS CAPITAL ADVISORS, LLC

Childress Capital Advisors, LLC is a registered investment advisory firm headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, providing investment management, wealth advisory, and financial planning services to high-net-worth individuals, families, and professionals across the Piedmont Triad region and beyond. The firm files with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under CIK #0001849561, with its 13F filing history commencing around 2022, reflecting a recent crossing of the SEC's institutional reporting threshold that marks the firm's emergence as an institutional-scale advisory operation. The firm was founded by Lance Childress, who serves as Chief Executive Officer and is the driving force behind the firm's investment philosophy, client service model, and growth strategy. Childress's name anchors the practice, reflecting the deeply personal accountability and reputational commitment characteristic of founder-led independent advisory firms. The decision to build an eponymous practice signals a level of personal investment in client outcomes that transcends typical corporate advisory structures — the founder's professional identity is inseparable from the firm's performance and reputation. Winston-Salem occupies a distinctive position within North Carolina's economic landscape. Historically anchored by the tobacco and textile industries, the city has successfully transitioned into a diversified economy encompassing healthcare — led by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and Novant Health — financial services, advanced manufacturing, and a growing technology sector. The broader Piedmont Triad region, connecting Winston-Salem with Greensboro and High Point, supports a substantial population of affluent professionals, healthcare executives, business owners, and retirees whose wealth management needs benefit from the kind of personalized, locally embedded advisory service that Childress Capital Advisors delivers. The region's economic maturity — characterized by established wealth alongside ongoing economic transition — creates a client base that values stability, income generation, and prudent capital stewardship alongside growth. The firm's recent crossing of the 13F reporting threshold, despite its establishment as an advisory practice prior to this milestone, indicates a meaningful acceleration in asset accumulation. In the competitive North Carolina advisory market — populated by national wirehouses, regional broker-dealers, and established independent RIAs — this growth trajectory reflects the strength of the firm's client value proposition and the effectiveness of its approach to winning and retaining high-net-worth advisory relationships.

Childress Capital Advisors employs a quality-oriented, income-aware investment strategy that combines direct individual equity ownership with strategic ETF positioning to construct portfolios calibrated to each client's growth, income, and preservation objectives. The firm's 13F Portfolio Composition reveals a hybrid portfolio architecture that blends fundamental equity selection with diversified ETF exposure, creating a layered framework that captures the personalization benefits of direct stock ownership alongside the cost efficiency and systematic diversification of passive vehicles. The investment philosophy, guided by founder Lance Childress, emphasizes ownership of quality businesses — companies with defensible competitive positions, consistent cash flow generation, strong balance sheets, and management teams committed to shareholder value creation through both operational excellence and capital return. This quality orientation extends naturally into an income awareness that favors companies with sustainable and growing dividend programs, providing clients with a rising income stream that supports lifestyle needs while simultaneously serving as a quality screen that filters for financial discipline and earnings durability. Sector diversification spans technology, healthcare, financials, industrials, and consumer segments, reflecting the broad application of the firm's quality selection criteria across the full equity market rather than concentrated exposure to any single industry thesis. Technology positions tend to favor established, cash-rich platforms with proven business models and shareholder return programs. Healthcare allocations capture the robust demand dynamics of the Winston-Salem region's dominant industry while accessing broader secular growth in pharmaceutical innovation and medical technology. Financial holdings provide income generation, economic sensitivity, and exposure to the credit intermediation that underpins broader economic activity. Industrial and consumer positions round out the allocation with exposure to manufacturing cycles, infrastructure spending, and consumer spending patterns. The integration of individual equities and ETFs serves complementary strategic purposes within the portfolio. Direct equity positions express the firm's highest-conviction fundamental views, enable security-level tax management through targeted harvesting of gains and losses, and allow precise calibration of portfolio income characteristics to client-specific distribution requirements. ETF allocations provide cost-efficient, diversified exposure to broader market segments, fixed income categories, or international markets where systematic participation takes priority over concentrated security selection. This hybrid approach delivers the benefits of active management where the firm's research edge is strongest while ensuring comprehensive market coverage through efficient passive vehicles. The quality income growth framework is particularly well-suited to the firm's Winston-Salem client base, which includes a significant demographic of retirees, medical professionals, and business owners for whom reliable income generation, capital preservation, and tax-efficient growth are often co-equal portfolio objectives. Rather than pursuing aggressive return maximization at the expense of income reliability and capital stability, the strategy seeks to compound wealth steadily through the dual engines of dividend growth and capital appreciation — a total return approach anchored by tangible, growing income. Portfolio turnover is low to moderate, reflecting the patient holding philosophy that quality income growth investing demands. High-quality, dividend-growing companies reward extended ownership through the compounding effect of reinvested dividends and sustained earnings growth, and premature selling sacrifices both the tax deferral benefit of unrealized gains and the long-term compounding power that the strategy is designed to capture. Position adjustments are driven by fundamental thesis changes, valuation considerations, client-specific tax management needs, and portfolio rebalancing requirements rather than by tactical market timing or momentum signals.

Childress Capital Advisors, LLC presents as a founder-led, Winston-Salem-based independent RIA that has achieved meaningful scale in the North Carolina wealth management market under the leadership of CEO Lance Childress. The firm's quality income growth investment approach — implemented through a hybrid individual equity and ETF portfolio framework — addresses the core wealth management priorities of income generation, capital preservation, and steady long-term compounding that define the financial objectives of its high-net-worth client base. The firm's Annualized Return (CAGR) as reconstructed from its initial 13F filings provides an early quantitative measure of the quality income growth strategy's compounding behavior. While the developing filing record constrains full-cycle assessment, the captured period — spanning the 2022 drawdown environment and subsequent recovery — provides concentrated insight into both the strategy's downside resilience and its upside participation during a dynamic market transition from rate-driven bear market to technology-led recovery. The Sortino Ratio is the most analytically appropriate efficiency metric for evaluating a quality income growth strategy. Because the approach explicitly targets downside protection through quality screening and dividend sustainability, the Sortino Ratio's focus on downside deviation directly measures whether these protective mechanisms function as designed. A favorable Sortino Ratio demonstrates that the quality income growth framework achieves the asymmetric outcome profile clients expect — participating meaningfully in market advances through capital appreciation and dividend growth while limiting the severity of capital impairment during corrections. Examination of Sector Allocation History within the equity component reveals how the firm has deployed capital across technology, healthcare, financial, industrial, and consumer sectors during its filing period. The relative weight assigned to healthcare — the dominant sector in the Winston-Salem regional economy — is particularly noteworthy, revealing whether the firm actively manages the human capital correlation risk faced by clients employed in the local healthcare industry or mirrors the sector's prominence in the firm's geographic context. The firm's Simulated Growth Chart rescaled to a chosen starting capital translates the quality income growth strategy's early performance record into an intuitive visual representation of wealth accumulation, drawdown behavior, and recovery dynamics during the firm's institutional reporting period. The defining analytical question for Childress Capital Advisors is one of quality income growth strategy differentiation in a yield-compressed landscape: as interest rates have normalized from their post-2008 lows and fixed income now offers competitive yields for the first time in over a decade, does the firm's quality dividend equity strategy continue to offer a compelling income-and-growth proposition relative to simpler fixed income alternatives — demonstrating that the combination of growing dividends, capital appreciation potential, and inflation protection inherent in quality equity ownership delivers superior total wealth outcomes compared to the now-available higher-yielding bond alternatives — or has the return of meaningful fixed income yields narrowed the relative advantage of dividend equity strategies to the point where the additional equity risk no longer commands a sufficient premium for income-oriented private wealth clients?

Childress Capital Advisors' risk framework reflects the preservation-conscious, income-oriented mandate that governs private wealth advisory relationships serving high-net-worth clients. The quality income growth equity orientation provides natural risk dampening relative to the broader market, as dividend-paying, quality companies historically exhibit lower volatility, shallower drawdowns, and faster recovery characteristics than non-dividend-paying or speculative equities. The firm's Volatility Profile is expected to demonstrate moderate characteristics — generally tracking at or below broad equity benchmark volatility during normal market conditions and providing meaningful relative cushioning during risk-off environments. The quality factor contributes to this lower volatility through more predictable earnings and cash flow patterns, while the dividend yield provides a return floor that partially offsets capital depreciation during declining markets. The addition of fixed income and diversified ETF positions further moderates total portfolio volatility relative to equity-only exposure. Given the firm's 13F filing history beginning around 2022, analysis of Max Drawdown Depth captures portfolio behavior during the latter stages of the 2022 bear market and the subsequent multi-phase recovery through 2023-2024. The 2022 environment provides a meaningful initial stress test, as rising interest rates created headwinds for both equity valuations and fixed income prices simultaneously. Quality dividend stocks experienced more moderate declines than high-growth, non-dividend-paying equities during this period, and the firm's portfolio behavior during this episode reveals whether the quality income growth framework delivered its expected protective characteristics under real-world adverse conditions. The Downside Capture Ratio relative to equity benchmarks provides the most client-relevant measure of risk management effectiveness. For clients whose portfolios fund retirement income, charitable commitments, and lifestyle maintenance, the downside capture metric directly quantifies how much market pain reaches their capital base during corrections — answering the practical question of whether professional quality-oriented management provides tangible protection during the drawdowns that most directly threaten financial plan integrity. Income sustainability risk — the possibility that dividend cuts or eliminations impair the portfolio's income-generating capacity — represents a strategy-specific risk dimension. During severe economic contractions, even companies with long dividend histories may reduce or suspend dividends to preserve liquidity. The firm's quality screening, which emphasizes balance sheet strength and payout ratio sustainability, serves as the primary defense against dividend impairment risk. The COVID-19 pandemic period, when numerous companies across multiple sectors cut dividends, provides context for understanding how widespread dividend disruption can affect income-oriented portfolios — though this episode occurred before the firm's 13F filing record began. Concentration risk at the individual equity level is managed through the diversified blend of direct holdings and broad-based ETF positions. The ETF allocation provides systematic diversification that mitigates the idiosyncratic risk inherent in individual stock positions, while the direct equity portfolio's sector diversification across technology, healthcare, financials, industrials, and consumer segments reduces sector-level concentration.